Murray Ewing's Reviews > Astercote

Mair and Peter Jenkins, newly moved into the village of Charlton Underwood after their father gets a job as headmaster of the local school, befriend a local oddball known as Goacher, an animal healer and guardian of what he only refers to as ‘the Thing’ in a local woods — a chalice which he and the villagers believe protected them in the past, and still protects them, from the Black Death, which destroyed the now-ruined and overgrown neighbouring village of Astercote. When ‘the Thing’ goes missing, the villagers start to get paranoid about a few coughs and colds, thinking the plague’s making a comeback. Chalk crosses (once used to mark houses shut off because of infection) are found on a few front doors, and the locals erect a barrier to keep away outsiders. The police and media think it’s quaint locals gone a bit doolally, but Mair and Peter know otherwise, and set out to put things right.

Or, they do eventually. Astercote’s a quick enough read, but I still found myself wondering, way past the midway point, when Mair and Peter were going to realise that they, as young adult protagonists of a young adult novel, ought to be not just sitting around watching things unfold but do something about it. ‘You know what,’ Peter says near the end of chapter 7, ‘it’s time someone looked for Goacher and brought the chalice back.’ And I thought, yes, it’s page 108 already, there’s only another 40 to go!

We do have an action-packed ending, though. I seem, in middle-age, to have developed an odd nostalgia for YA books from my own young adulthood that I never actually read. There’s something about the lost world of country villages, ghostly links with the past, and hints of mythical magic that books like Astercote conjure, which was lost a decade or so later. This was a moderately good example of the species (though the magic, here, is almost non-existent), enough for me to have ordered another of Penelope Lively’s YA books. I should say that I came to this novel thanks to The Heartwood Institute’s album, also titled Astercote, which provides a soundtrack to the book as if it were adapted for the TV of the time, along the lines of Children of the Stones and the like.